To keep your organization successful, you must stay current with evolving technology and find ways to apply it that improve productivity, reduce expenses, or strengthen your brand. While rapid implementations that address short-term issues can lead to an organization’s immediate success, smart technology acceleration focuses on long-term strategies capable of supporting the company’s vision and avoid 3 common tech acceleration mistakes.
While these types of tech acceleration initiatives are important, they can have their share of pitfalls. In our experience, there are 3 common tech acceleration mistakes that may cause you to fall behind or even prevent you from achieving your ultimate goal.
- Concentrating on rapid advancements or short-term goals. This is one of the most common mistakes that companies make. Business leaders with a short-term view of the world tend to be interested in immediate results at the expense of strategic planning. They make quick decisions that only address the symptoms of a problem rather than its root cause. Although these moves may be profitable in the short term, they can negatively affect a company’s future prospects. It can be tempting to find easy wins (quick projects that can give you the feeling of accomplishing something) by adopting whatever “latest and greatest” technology hits the market, but doing so can paint your organization into a corner if that technology doesn’t align with your long-term goals. Be thoughtful about what technology you invest in. With new technology often comes up-front costs, user training requirements, process and documentation changes, and a laundry list of other change-management considerations. Make sure it’s worth it before diving in headfirst.
- Making decisions based on current costs rather than long term value. Another common mistake made by executives is that they prefer purchasing less expensive products or solutions simply because the lower upfront cost better suits their budget. More often than not, these solutions only meets an immediate need and don’t support the organization’s overall mission. This is because the long-term value of a product or service is what truly matters. Instead of making decisions based on current costs, it’s important to consider how an investment will affect the bottom line in future years. In fact, this is one reason why insurance companies are so successful: they have been able to accurately predict the cost of paying out claims based on demographic data, while many other businesses fail at doing so. Choose the technology that will help make your organization more efficient for years to come, not the technology that is the least expensive today.
- Deploying products that don’t integrate. Integrated solutions can bring long-term benefits to your organization because they consolidate processes and data. However, some executives overlook this, resulting in products or technologies being implemented that don’t integrate. Disparate technologies that lack integration can be a liability for an organization in the long run. They can slow down or even halt projects until a sufficient integrated infrastructure is built and put in place. They complicate workflows and can be frustrating for employees. Organization should seek out technology that makes both employees and organizations more efficient.
If you fail to overcome these mistakes while accelerating your tech, you risk losing ground to your competitors. It’s time to ditch quick fixes that aren’t helping you achieve your goals in favor of smart tech acceleration that helps you achieve long-term productivity and operational success.
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